On this day, 20 September 1893, New York Yiddish anarchist newspaper Fraye Arbiter Shtime (Free Voice of Labor) sponsored its first Yom Kippur concert, ball and buffet. A mass, 24-hour, anti-religious event, it was met by several thousand people outside Clarendon Hall with the police intervening and making arrests. The Yom Kippur Ball “tradition” originated in 1888 in London before spreading to New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago. It made a comeback in New York in 1900, when the Yiddish newspaper invited “all freethinkers to gather in the lovely Clarendon Hall where singing, recitations, and performances fitting for this occasion will be held.” Anti-anarchist repression by the state increased in the following years (partly in response to attacks by the “propaganda by deed” current) and the tradition of the ball weakened, eventually being replaced by a picnic on Long Island.
Pictured: a poster advertising the event https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1215390048646143/?type=3